Re: On Anarchy II

“Removing the lie” with an argument only works for the reflective thinkers of the population, which is a fairly small slice. Notably, the INTJ(P) personality type, the mental system builders who are bothered by logical inconsistencies and also willing to follow ideas to where they will lead without regard for social consequences and “what other people will think.”

I suggest to you that you’ve outlined a rationale for a rhetorical strategy for change. However I think we’re fairly deep into the diminishing returns portion of that strategy. These two types form about 5% of the population. Which in the US would be about 15 million people. Common estimates for libertarian thinking peoples are about 3%, at least that’s how many voted for Ron Paul, et al. in 2012 iirc.

Many more people are sympathetic to the ideas of freedom, but would be unwilling to leave their ideological “tribe” because they still believe in democracy, which is largely because they still think in collectivist terms. INTJ(P)s are more introverted, and thus more individualist. They don’t need the presence and interaction with others to survive.

Studies have shown this is because the brain of an introvert is already overstimulated by internal thoughts. They don’t need external stimulus like the extroverts do, who have brains that are understimulated when left to themselves.

This makes extroverts subject to collectivist thinking, to herd mentality, to the question of “what others would think” if they became an anarchist–since they fear being alone, being exiled or shunned. Which frankly a lot of us, as introverts, do not.

E.g.: I was just at home in Tokyo as I am in the US, never experienced home-sickness or the like. It was an interesting place to be for the 10 days I visited. I would’ve loved to stay.

Anyway, I suggest to you that your strategy as outlined here can be effective in gathering further to the fold those who are susceptible to this kind of appeal, the INTJ(P)s of the world.

But to make real headway with the other personality types we’ll need a different strategy altogether, and that strategy must be rooted in practical experience.

We must actually build an ancap enclave, implement our ideas of decentralized law, decentralized services-of-governance-without-government, and decentralized money, and then invite the non-ideological to begin living in these communities.

The grand test will be this: do the non-ideological adapt to our system, use it, and prefer it over the statist alternative?

If that ends up being the case, and I have good reason to think it will eminently be the case, then we can create a growing community where the non-ideological will begin living an ancap lifestyle, and come to overshadow in numbers the ideological ancaps.

They will adopt an ancap society as their status-quo, and come to defend it and believe in it the same way that the non-ideological of the US and other places have come to defend democracy and the like as a function of status-quo bias.

From there we will at last have two competing systems: a living, dynamic, explosively growing, wealthy ancap society with people streaming in for a better life and more opportunity from all over the world; and the dead statist status quo which grows ever deader the more laws get past, the more regulations go into effect, the more taxes and controls get passed.

We will by this means populate the world with ancap societies and brain-drain, talent-drain, investment-drain, and wealth-drain the entire world.

This can be accomplished very quickly, and I expect to see 1 million+ ancap societies within my lifetime. Possibly many of them, and much larger in number than that.

And I expect to see them first on the sea, in a seasteading context. If you guys haven’t been following seasteading events lately, the Seasteading Institute believes it is close to a deal with a South American country to form a ZEDE in their territorial waters which would allow us to begin building the first full-scale seastead within 2 years.

It will be a place to build an economic base on, and events will likely move quickly from there.

This will be effective because right now the statists’ greatest argument against us is a status-quo argument: where is anarcho-capitalism working in the world today? Well we know it’s already working virtually everywhere, so let’s show them how it can work in a formal setting.

When they see it working in actuality, when reporters can run down there and do stories on it, when they can interview the non-ideological who moved there for a better life, when they can see with their own eyes replacement governance services actually working and being used, then they will face the kind of cognitive dissonance that ideas alone could not give them before, and that they cannot dismiss as easily as they can words and theories. These are people that need to see with their eyes. And when they do, all bets are off.

Take bitcoin as an example: we’ve been arguing for decades that a non-fiat currency would be better for X,Y,Z reasons. Where did that get us? Nowhere.

But actually building a replacement voluntarist service, bitcoin, and then actually using it ourselves has changed the entire dynamic, people are now forced to take it seriously by its staying power, and we’re inches away from living through financial history.

There is an Anarchy II, but it is the anarchy of anarcho-capitalists as opposed to the previous left-anarchism that thought to make change mainly through war, violence, and political agitation. That’s gotten them less than nowhere in the last century+.

And when democracy rolled over the world as a concept, was it because we forced others to adopt democracy? No, it was because they themselves saw that it worked and was a good idea, a logical alternative to monarchy, autocracy, and the tyranny of kings and generals.

Today our rhetorical task it to explain why democracy has failed and why our theory of political organization is a logical successor to democracy. What remains is to show it working, then let the idea sweep away democracies the world over not by the power of militaries or force, but because a better idea always replaces a failed one. And it is very nearly clear to people today that democracy has failed.

Let us now build our ideas into the world and test them with experience, live them ourselves. The result may be a new world for all.